CALL ME SINBAD

‘Paulo, stop talking nonsense. Instead of a ten-year-old boy, you sound like a ten-month-old baby!’

What a smarty-pants, my dad. What a joker. What nice things he has to say.

I told him this because he spends the whole time talking on the mobile. There are times I stop playing or watching TV just to count the minutes he’s able to talk non-stop on the mobile. Believe me, he’s a phenomenon, one of a kind. His record is twenty-three minutes (minutes, mind, not seconds). That was when he received a call from the office at some unearthly hour (my mother was in bed, Grandpa and me too, we all got really annoyed because he wouldn’t shut up and there was no way we could sleep with him talking on the mobile, especially when he started shouting like crazy, ‘That’s impossible! The budgets have been in since September. I want that on my desk first thing in the morning!’ Work stuff, right?). That time he talked non-stop for twenty-three minutes plus a few seconds. But seconds don’t count, not for the record. Just minutes. Twenty-three. Though if we were to add up all the time he spends chatting away on the mobile from dawn to dusk, there’d be a lot more minutes than that. Way more. An unbelievable amount.

If talking on the mobile was an Olympic sport, my dad would take gold, you can be sure of that.

Which is why I told him his ear was red. Anyway it was true, I wasn’t making it up. His ear was as red as the tomato sauce Mum throws on top of the spaghetti. Bright red from all that talking on the mobile. Red and cooked like a velvet swimming crab.

Yummy.

Another day, it was funny, I hid his mobile. To see what would happen. He’d gone into the bathroom to do those things one does in the bathroom and left his mobile on the sitting room table. It was an unusual situation because normally he’d take it with him into the bathroom. In fact he has it with him all the time, hanging on a coloured band with the name of his company on it, some kind of elastic necklace (you know, I even think he sleeps with it, puts on his pyjamas and gets into bed with his mobile hanging around his neck, just in case he receives a call at night). So, as soon as he’d gone into the bathroom, I took it and hid it under my bed. You wouldn’t believe the state he got into, just because his mobile had disappeared. He rummaged around inside his jacket. He searched the house from top to bottom. He even went so far as to blame my mother for having lost it.

Poor thing.

She said Dad needed to see a shrink.

I don’t know what that means.

But he sure does.

In the end he found out it was me because the mobile started ringing. So he saw where the sound of the call was coming from, the mobile turned up and he knew who’d been playing tricks.

‘You’re just like your grandfather!’ he shouted, all worked up, while grabbing the phone to answer it. ‘All day long, just like him, playing tricks. You’re as bad as each other.’

Grandpa, who up until that point had remained silent, watching with some amusement my dad’s despair in search of the lost mobile (now that would make a good title for a film, Dad in Search of the Lost Mobile, like Indiana Jones or something), turned serious and replied:

Dad never stops looking at his mobile, as if he thought it was going to escape or something, like, you know, sprout legs and run around the corner. He sits down to watch telly, leaves his mobile switched on on the glass table and keeps picking it up to see if he’s got any messages or a call. I say to him:

‘But, Dad, the mobile didn’t even go off. Stop picking it up all the time. You’re like a child with a toy.’

He doesn’t answer, but gives me that look he uses when he wants me to be quiet. According to him, I’m only ten years old and what do I understand?

I suppose that’s true, I don’t understand grown-up stuff.

I don’t understand, for example, how my dad can work at the office until eight every day and yet, when he comes home, those bores from the office keep on ringing him. It appears his fellow workers don’t know how to function without him. When I’m at school, I finish classes and head out the door, the teacher doesn’t then call me at home to give me further homework (thank God!). But Dad gets calls. That’s why he only ever thinks about work.

My mother said to him the other day:

‘All you ever do is work. You could turn off that device when you get home. Couldn’t you do without that thingy from time to time?’

‘You know full well I can’t do without that “thingy”, as you call it,’ he replied very seriously. ‘Business is going well. We’re earning lots of money at work and, if I carry on like this, the boss will just have to promote me. So what I have to do is work hard so I can make progress.’

‘Bernardino doesn’t have a mobile phone!’ shouted Grandpa from bed.

And just when my mother was going to tell them both where to get off (my father because he won’t switch off his mobile phone, my grandfather because he keeps on talking about Bernardino, who doesn’t exist), the mobile went off (saved by the bell!), my father pressed it against his ear, stood up and started pacing up and down the hallway, dealing with work things. By which I mean, making his ear go red. He almost beat his record that day.

He was only a minute off.

So, you see, my father never forgets his mobile phone. He may forget me (there are days he doesn’t even look in my direction) or Grandpa (the same), but not his mobile.